


Objects In Mirrors Are Closer Than They Appear

by convexxed



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Alice in Wonderland Fusion, Baekhyun-centric, ChanBaek - Freeform, Drama, Fantasy, If You Squint - Freeform, Light Angst, M/M, Minor Character Death, Minor Violence, OT9 - Freeform, Other, Psychological Drama, baeksoo - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 11:53:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11759295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/convexxed/pseuds/convexxed
Summary: Baekhyun wants to protest and object that no, he is not out of his mind like everybody else here… but he honestly doesn’t know what to believe anymore. Is he really losing his mind? Is everyone here a mere figment of his imagination? Or are they old friends whose faces and names he forgot, just like his own?





	Objects In Mirrors Are Closer Than They Appear

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! First and foremost, thanks to the prompter for helping this little mushroom turn her burning desire of writing an Alice in Wonderland!au into a reality. I hope this lives up to your expectations! Thanks to my beta B for being amazing and keeping me motivated until the very end, I love you. Thanks to J for the emotional support, I love you too. Thanks to the mods for running this fest and their patience, and for being overall sweethearts. Putting this fic together involved TONS of research and thinking but I had a fantastic time and I'm quite pleased with the outcome. This is an OT9, Baekhyun-centric fic (if you squint you get to see the pairings) and total word count is 21.6k (wow). Thank you for taking the time to read; enjoy!  
>  _Disclaimer:_ some phrases/quotes were taking directly from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What She Found There.  
>  _P.S._ The title is a riddle, too.

_Aisle 5. Potato chips. Organic chips. Pretzels. Popcorn. Nuts._

“There’s over ten different flavours to pick from. Did you want me to list them out for you?” Baekhyun asks into the phone he’s holding to his right ear, swirling his tongue around the peaches and cream flavoured lollipop in his mouth. “They’ve got sea salt, cheddar, maple bacon, sour cream and onion, vinegar and salt—“

Frowning, Baekhyun crouches down and squints as he reads over the available potato chip flavours, eventually reaching out to grab an orange bag from the bottom shelf.

“They have the honey Dijon ones.” He informs with a groan and adds another bag of chips to his basket, much to his displeasure. “Yes, I’m getting you two bags. What else did you want?” 

Baekhyun belatedly realises his mistake, wincing as his friend and designated roommate for the trip starts listing junk food items and drinks (his priorities include beer and a very wide range of potato chips), but he isn’t planning to purchase any of those things. It wasn’t his fault that the dumbass he had for friend had caught a cold after coming up with the brilliant idea of taking a dive in the pool at midnight, or that he was currently stuck in their shared hotel room with a runny nose that excluded from all the fun activities that their group had planned.

He’d offered to make a run to the nearest convenience store and get him some snacks since he wasn’t in the mood for getting drunk with the rest of their friends, but he’d much rather be playing games on his laptop or exploring the karaoke bars around the area. Taking care of a sick person wasn’t among his plans for this trip, but he certainly isn’t going to leave his dumb and annoying friend to fend on his own and possibly spread a virus around the hotel. Baekhyun has always taken pride in being a good and reliable friend and he doesn’t intend for that to change tonight, thank you very much.

“Try not to die before I go back.” Baekhyun jokes as he grabs a bottle of apple juice from the cooler and a package of honey-lemon cough drops from a shelf, and then ends the call before his friend starts rambling again and demanding for him to get him half of the junk food aisle. He continues strolling through the store and decides to make a quick stop to pick up some more candy for himself, humming along to the music playing through the speakers while he examines the lollipops and candy bars. “Buy two, get one free—whoa there.”

Baekhyun’s knees buckle when the lights above his head start to flicker and buzz, until they eventually go off with a _click_ and he’s left staring with his mouth ajar and fingers tightly closed around a crushed candy bar. The rest of the lights are intact, though, and there are beads of cold sweat adorning his forehead despite the AC blowing throughout the store and chilling the tips of his fingertips and ears. When he peers down, he finds that the KitKat and Snickers bars have switched places, and the one he was holding in his free hand until not too long ago has vanished without leaving a trace, and his fingers are curled around nothing but air.

 _Curiouser and curiouser,_ Baekhyun thinks, still shocked to the point of forgetting how to properly construct sentences, and after sparing one last glance at the candy bars he decides to not get anything from the aisle and simply move on to check-out the items already in his basket. 

A gush of cold air makes Baekhyun shudder when he steps past the glass doors of the convenience store and into the street, carrying the plastic bag with his purchases in a hand while the other adjusts his blue and white bomber jacket around his torso. It’s unusually cold for this time of the year but Baekhyun doesn’t think much of it, as he’s still shaken by the incident with the flickering lights and candy bars that magically changed places, but he eventually opts to simply brush it all off and head back to the hotel to get some rest.

He’s probably just tired, he reasons as he walks down the street, skirting his eyes over the booths at his left and right until a lonely and deserted stall sparks his curiosity and his feet take him closer to it, as if some sort of invisible force was acting upon them and dictating the direction of Baekhyun’s steps. 

Where are the pots filled to the brim with stew, and the meat sizzling on the grill? Why are there no customers lining up and demanding to be served, tapping their feet impatiently on the ground until their order is handed to them? What kind of food and beverages does this particularly gloomy stall sell? More and more questions pop in Baekhyun’s head as he studies the stall before him, clutching a bit tighter the plastic bag in his hand.

The vendor is sitting on the sidewalk, perched atop what seems to be a box of sorts, and their face is hidden behind large round sunglasses and a black scarf, and Baekhyun briefly ponders over the possibility of the vendor having either suddenly died or being a mere puppet to scare away curious passersby. But what would be the purpose of such measure when there is nothing to sell and no one to scare away? Scarecrows in crops make sense, but this is honestly kind of ridiculous.

“Excuse me?” He ventures, taking a step forwards and lightly waving his hand to draw the vendor’s attention. The latter remains unresponsive. “Um…”

In an unexpected turn of events, the vendor lifts an arm and points towards the cart at their left, and Baekhyun widens his eyes when he spots a small, antique brass trinket with a glass top and red velvet cushion lining the bottom, sitting atop the otherwise empty grill. Frowning, he steps closer and hesitantly lifts the lid to reveal the contents of the trinket. Inside he finds a single cupcake frosted with baby pink and turquoise buttercream and decorated with mixed berries and edible flowers, but what captures his eye is the piece of white chocolate with the words _”Eat Me”_ that has been placed at the peak of the buttercream swirl.

It evokes a rush of nostalgia that feels foreign yet oddly familiar, and Baekhyun feels the ground beneath his feet shake. Maybe he’s just imagining things. He bites down on the remainder of the peaches and cream lollipop and glances back at the vendor, but all that’s left is the black scarf and round sunglasses whose owner seems to have disappeared into the night—just like the candy bar did back at the convenience store. 

“Ah, should I just take it?” Baekhyun asks to the night and no one in particular, discreetly glancing around before shutting the glass lid and carefully picking up the trinket with his free hand, briefly examining it from every possible angle. After a minute of debating whether to leave the trinket where he found it or take it back to the hotel with him, he decides to go for the latter because the trinket box is beautiful and leaving the cupcake there would be a shame. Besides, he didn’t get any candy bars and he’s still craving for something sweet.

It takes him fifteen minutes to find his way back to the hotel where they’re all staying and another three to make his way up to the fourth floor, and soon enough he’s hurriedly crossing the door marked with the numbers 4-1-8 with the trinket box clutched to his chest as a slight paranoia starts to kick in. He shuts the door behind him as quietly as he can manage and looks through the peephole to make sure that no one followed him; he’s almost expecting to see either the vendor or the police standing outside but the corridor is deserted. He’s safe.

“What have you got there?” 

Baekhyun jumps in surprise, as he had forgotten that he wasn’t alone in the room, and he’s quick to hide the trinket box behind him before turning around to face his friend with an arm extended towards him, the plastic bag dangling from his hand. 

“Honey Dijon chips, cough drops and apple juice. You’re welcome.”

His friend reaches out for the bag with a grimace, clearly unsatisfied. “Hey, where’s the beer I requested? Baekhyun, I hate apple juice. You’re an awful friend.”

“Boo. Sucks to be you.” Baekhyun says with a nonchalant shrug as he spins around and marches towards the bathroom, using his body to hide the trinket box from his friend’s curious eyes and greedy hands. He doesn’t feel like sharing his treat with anyone right now, especially since he hasn’t yet unveiled its secrets. (If it holds any, that is.)

He sets the trinket box atop the counter and leans down to examine the cupcake through the glass lid, running a hand through his vibrant red (albeit slightly dry) hair as he straightens up and his gaze locks with the one that his reflection is sending back. A subtle blush colours his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, and the temporary tattoo of a flamingo on the left side of his neck is starting to fade at last. What a shame. He’d get a real one if his pain tolerance was higher but he’s positive that he’d end up passing out barely a minute into the session and goodness, that’d be terribly embarrassing.

“Please don’t go into details, but what in earth is taking you so long? I need to use the bathroom.”

Baekhyun clicks his tongue and nervously glances around when he hears footsteps coming his way, flushing the toilet to earn himself some time as he tugs off his pants and bomber jacket, then hurriedly wraps them around the trinket box so he can walk out of the bathroom without his friend suspecting anything. Surprisingly, it works.

“Have fun in there.” He shouts in a teasing tone that results in him getting smacked on the back of the head, setting the bundle of fabric on the floor next to his bed before flopping down there with a sigh. Then he sits up with renewed energy and reaches out to grab the bottle from the nightstand between the beds, settling back down with a huff as he uncaps it and brings it to his lips. “Apple juice isn’t gross.”

It isn’t, but it doesn’t taste like apple at all. Baekhyun lowers the bottle to inspect it, worried that he might’ve picked the wrong flavour, but the label states that the clear honey-coloured beverage in his hand is, in fact, apple juice. Mystified, he takes another sip and this time he’s able to make out some of the flavours dancing on his tongue and making it tingle: he detects hints of cherry tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast.

Suddenly, the lights flicker and Baekhyun holds his breath, starting to feel worried and slightly paranoid since it’s the second time tonight that such a strange phenomenon involving ceiling lights takes place near him. If there is a scientific and logical explanation to this, he’d love to hear it before he goes crazy.

“What’s with you today? You’re acting weird.” 

The boy that just re-entered the room is judging Baekhyun hard and even looks genuinely concerned about his sanity (that wouldn’t be a first but now he probably has enough reasons to worry), but Baekhyun knows that he hasn’t lost his mind and gone mad—rather, it’s the world around him that seems to be changing. 

“Just…the lights flickered.” Baekhyun says a tad sheepishly and drops his gaze to the bottle of juice in his hands, setting it aside with a sigh. “But I might have imagined it, so don’t mind me too much. I’ll call the desk anyway to let them that their lights aren’t working well.”

Baekhyun’s friend murmurs a “yeah, you do just that” as he slips back under the covers and curls up into himself with his back facing the redhead, who breathes out in relief and pinches the bridge of his nose in an attempt at chasing away the headache that threatens to become a baby migraine if left unattended. Maybe it’ll go away if he eats something, he reasons as he leans over the edge of the bed and picks up the trinket box from the floor, glancing over his shoulder to make sure that his friend is still asleep before removing the lid and taking out the cupcake.

Surprisingly, the frosting is still intact and the mixed berries don’t seem to have moved an inch despite all the handling, and Baekhyun can’t help but inwardly praise whoever put together such an intricate, beautiful and cryptic piece. Was it a baker with extraordinary artistic qualities or an artist with a passion for baking? Baekhyun sighs, not even stopping to consider that the cupcake might be tampered before popping a berry into his mouth, peeling off the piece of white chocolate adorning the frosting and carefully setting it aside.

“Eat me? Well, don’t mind if I do.”

And Baekhyun does. The berries and flowers used as decoration are juicy and sweet like icing sugar, and the baby pink and turquoise buttercream frosting that tastes like cotton candy transports Baekhyun to his childhood days where his parents would take him and his brother to the town’s summer fair. The sponge is vanilla with hints of pineapple and perhaps orange, and Baekhyun finds with great delight that the subtle tanginess of the cake goes amazingly well with the piece of white chocolate that he’d saved for last. 

Sighing, he sets the now empty trinket box aside and lies down on the bed with his legs stretched out and a hand rubbing circles over his stomach, licking his lips to collect any crumbs and frosting around his mouth. His headache has begun to ebb away at last but it isn’t long until Baekhyun finds himself struggling to keep his eyes open, and after a minute or so of fruitlessly trying to chase away his drowsiness he finally succumbs to it and slips into a deep slumber. Right before his eyes fall shut, he spots a pair of gleaming pink eyes staring at him from across the room, and he thinks he can also hear the insistent ticking of a clock even after he’s engulfed by darkness.

 

+++

 

Midnight rolls around a few hours later and Baekhyun wakes up with a gasp, feeling around his neck with trembling fingers for any traces that his head might’ve been detached from his body like it did in his dream. He can clearly recall the haunting shrieks of _Off with her head! Off with his head! Off with everyone’s heads!_ , and for some odd reason he also finds himself thinking about Lobster-Quadrilles and a sad song about turtle soup. 

Event though Baekhyun didn’t have a single drop of alcohol before bed he does feel sort of hungover: he’s confused to the point where he can’t recall when he fell asleep nor can he recognise his surroundings, his cheeks are warmer than usual and his dizziness is bad enough to make him want to throw up. Carefully, he swings his legs to the side and does an attempt at getting up, but his balance is so poor that he ends up flailing his arms about before opting for dropping to his knees and crawling all the way to the bathroom.

The other bed is empty, although Baekhyun misses this seemingly insignificant detail as he’s already struggling enough to get himself in one piece to his destination, and once he reaches the bathroom door he lets out a sigh of relief that reverberates through the quiet and dark hotel room. Cold fingers skid across the wall until they find the switch and a warm light fills the area, briefly blinding the confused redhead, and once his pupils have adapted to the brightness he reaches out to turn on the faucet and collects some water in his hands to splash his face with it.

_Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!_

Baekhyun jerks up and holds his breath when he hears these words, opening his eyes as wide as they go and perking his ears to try and catch that faint voice again. It couldn’t possibly be his friend, right? He’s a heavy sleeper and the voice seemed to have come from somewhere _within_ the bathroom, though he can’t figure how that could be remotely possible.

“Who’s there?” He asks in a whisper, droplets of water trickling down his face and clinging precariously to the tips of his red hair. Maybe he’s imagining things, after all. Sighing, he lets his head drop forwards as he rolls his shoulders back to release some tension, and he promptly clasps a hand over his mouth to muffle an expletive upon noticing that the mirror before him has begun to dissolve into some sort of silvery mist. 

The lights flicker again and Baekhyun reaches out to touch the mist, ignoring the voice in his head urging him to step backwards and run, and the next thing he knows is that he’s getting sucked into a vortex that wasn’t there before.

He’s falling. Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? And why is he going downwards, when he clearly went vertically through a mirror? More questions arise as the seconds pass and Baekhyun is worried that the speed of his fall might result in him hitting the ground and ending up looking like that one tomato that rolled off his plate and his friend accidentally stepped on, making a mess all over the floor. Goodness, no. He doesn’t want to look like a squished tomato, but how is he to stop his fall?

Baekhyun shuts his eyes tightly and braces for the impact to come, gritting his teeth and tensing his muscles out of instinct, but he’s still far from reaching the bottom of the hole he fell into—but didn’t he get here through a mirror? What kind of nonsense is this? It’s impossible for him to make out any shape throughout his fall, for all he can see are blurry blobs of colour, but he does detect a faint smell of sulfur, charcoal and aluminum and he can’t help but think of sparklers and bright coloured slivers of light. There is also an annoying ticking noise whose source remains unknown, and Baekhyun perks his ears in hopes of catching any other sound besides the incessant _tick tock_ that’s starting to get on his nerves.

_Off with his head!_

Gasping, Baekhyun opens his eyes and finds himself standing in the middle of a room with black opaque curtains covering the walls and paper sheets suspended in the air, although he learns upon further inspection that they’re hanging by a fine thread from the structures rising from the ground around him that, just like the three chairs randomly placed about, are made of white marble. What is this place and how did he get here? 

“You’re late.”

Baekhyun spins around and finds a man occupying one of the three chairs, sitting with his right leg elegantly crossed over the left and holding a pocket watch in his gloved hands, which he later tucks into the pocket of his emerald green asymmetric waistcoat. A red bowtie adorns the collar of the crisp white button-down shirt he’s wearing underneath, and the tips of his platinum hair fall barely past dark eyebrows and rest right above a pair of mesmerising pink eyes. The expression on his face is one of annoyance towards Baekhyun, though the redhead can't think of anything he could’ve done or said to upset him. 

“I beg your pardon, sir?” He ventures somewhat timidly, shrinking into himself as pink eyes scan him from head to toe. “I’m afraid—”

“It isn’t respectable to beg.” The mysterious man with platinum hair states, pushing his gold framed glasses up his nose with his forefinger. “If you mean to apologise for anything, let it be your timing—or lack thereof. What are you afraid of?”

Baekhyun clears his throat. “I didn’t mean to say that I was fearful. Rather, I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about. _Sir._ ”

“Fear of the unknown. Very understandable.” The man nods, although Baekhyun still has no clue about what is going on and how he got here. “It’s the most rational of fears, albeit seldom discussed about. Do you know why?” Baekhyun shakes his head. “I do,” says the man as he stands up from the chair and smooths down any wrinkles that may have formed on his pristine black slacks, and Baekhyun suddenly feels severely underdressed in only his white tee and underwear, “but I shall leave that for another occasion. Time has been in such an ugly mood and nothing seems to please him, not even poetry.”

“I never knew that the time had moods.” Baekhyun points out with a raised brow, earning himself a puzzled look from the man before him.

“Of course He does. Had he been in a good one, you wouldn’t have been so late.”

“What made it upset?” Baekhyun insists, determined to get an explanation to all the nonsense surrounding him. “And what was I late for? I can’t be late to an appointment I never made. I don’t even know how I got here.”

“Where you come from doesn’t matter,” interrupts another voice, that this time comes from a man with messy pink hair and Kohl-rimmed green eyes that remind Baekhyun of his grandmother’s black cat, perched atop one of the marble flat arches, “as long as you have a destination.”

“Well, that’s the issue!” Baekhyun grunts, irritated. “I don’t wish to move _forwards_ , but rather to go _back_ where I came from.”

“And where do you come from?” The man with pink hair is agile and graceful, Baekhyun learns when he effortlessly dismounts the arch and lands _en pointe_ , lowering his heels towards the ground as he extends his arms to the sides and bows. He’s dressed in black tights and an oversized burgundy and white striped sweater that reaches all the way down to the middle of his thighs and whose sleeves are so long that completely cover his hands, and he’s wearing black leather ankle booties on his feet. How he managed to pull such a smooth landing and where he came from, Baekhyun hasn’t got a clue.

The man with the platinum hair doesn’t look amused in the slightest by the newcomer’s appearance, which has caused his left eye to twitch. “Manners, Jongin!”

“If you’d stayed away from the wine and kept your mouth shut at Time’s tea party last Thursday, perhaps you two would still be in good terms with each other.” Says the man named Jongin, his voice akin to a purr, and Baekhyun notices at last the two orbital piercings adorning his left ear.

“Pardon me?”

“Oh, I’m not offended.”

“It was Sehun that upset Him, not me.” The man protests, his voice going higher in volume and pitch and cheeks turning a shade of pink brighter than Jongin’s hair but not quite as intense as his own eyes. “He kept telling jokes at his expense and I laughed at one, but Time thought it was me causing the fuss and the young one got away with it.”

Thankful that the conversation is no longer centered on him, Baekhyun decides to step in after being silent for the past couple minutes. “Who is Sehun?”

“Not who, but _what_.” Jongin purrs, the corners of his full lips tugging up into a grin as he extends his arms overhead to stretch them out. “He’s mad. In fact, we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” Baekhyun presses on, folding his arms over his chest and narrowing his eyes at the pink haired man whose remarks he isn’t very fond of.

“You must be, or you wouldn’t have come here.”

“But I don’t know how I got here!” He cries out in frustration as he rolls his eyes and runs a hand through his vibrant red hair, shoulders slumping forwards in defeat after reminding himself that throwing a tantrum won’t get him anywhere nor answer his questions. “I don’t even know what this place is.”

“Junmyeon, you tell him.”

The man with platinum hair and intense pink eyes, whose name had been a mystery until then, pulls his golden watch out of the pocket of his waistcoat again and brings it to his eye level, studying it for a few seconds before tucking it back in with a heavy sigh. “Why, this is the End of the World, of course.”

The End of the World. 

Baekhyun feels the ground beneath his feet tremble in fear as the prelude of something bigger and more terrible than anything he could imagine, filling his heart with darkness and the paralyzing kind of fear that roots him to the ground and knocks the air out of his lungs, coiling in his gut once it has finished messing his insides up. Whatever is happening, it can’t be good. 

“We’re running out of time.” Junmyeon strains out once the quake has stopped, pulling Baekhyun and Jongin out of their reverie. He’s gone pale and his eye is twitching again though this time is accompanied by spasms that make his body contort in weird angles, and draw broken words and gasps from his mouth.

Baekhyun is terrified, to say the least, and he realises the severity of the situation when Jongin strides over to the man with a grave look on his face and all hints of playful mischievousness gone from his green eyes. He ponders if there’s any relation between Junmyeon’s state and the cracks appearing on the surface of the marble chairs and arches, or if it’s all a twisted coincidence.

“What’s wrong with him?” He asks when Junmyeon lets out a particularly loud howl that forces a cold sensation up Baekhyun’s back and makes the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand on edge. The sight is beyond terrifying and the ground has begun shaking again, and this time around it’s so violent that the marble arches are reduced to debris within seconds. “What’s happening? Am I dreaming? How do I wake up? I don’t want to be here anymore, what do I do?”

“Go forth—”

“But I want to go back!” Baekhyun cries out in despair, losing his balance and flailing his arms about before helplessly falling onto his hands and knees.

“—into yesterday. There you shall find what you’re looking for.”

The black velvety walls around him are already cracking and crumbling as well, and it’s probably just a matter of minutes until the room collapses into itself and crushes them to their death. He’s also belatedly realising that there are neither windows nor a door, and therefore no way out of the room. The last thing he sees before everything gets sucked into a void and his conscience abandons him is the reflection of his terrified face etched into the bright pink eyes of a white rabbit that somehow resembles Junmyeon.

 

+++

 

_Go forth into yesterday._

Jongin’s cryptic instructions are not only physically impossible, but they also lack any sort of logic. Yesterday is gone, today is now and tomorrow is yet to come, and if Baekhyun were to go forth then he’d find himself walking straight into tomorrow (considering that he could somehow tweak time at will) and once he caught up with it, tomorrow would become today and today would be a mere echo of yesterday. 

_There you shall find what you’re looking for._

Except Baekhyun isn’t looking for anything. In fact, he isn’t moving at all; he’s lying on the ground with his eyes closed and arms extended at his sides, blades of grass caressing his cheeks whenever a light breeze blows and makes them dance to a soundless melody. He ought to go on a quest for answers, but stillness seems to go better with him. His nose easily detects the distinctive sweet scent of flowers, and his ears pick up some high-pitched giggles and voices coming from somewhere nearby.

“There’s one other flower roaming about the garden that looks like you, same awkward shape and all,” says a soft yet somewhat mature female voice that makes red bloom beneath Baekhyun’s eyelids, “except they’re redder, and their petals are shorter and a much darker shade than yours.”

Another voice chimes in with, “They’re done up close, almost like a dahlia, not tumbled about anyhow, like yours.” Cue more giggling.

Baekhyun frowns, not quite fond of having such remarks made about his appearance, and wonders who are the ones coming up with them. He’s curious, but his eyelids are heavy and the rest of his body is still unresponsive to his brain’s commands, thus he can’t bring himself to fully wake up just yet and reluctantly settles for listening to whatever else the voices say about him and the flower roaming about the garden. (“At least now I know where I am,” Baekhyun thinks.)

“I daresay you’ll see them soon. Be careful, for they’re one of the thorny kind.” 

Rather than diffusing the curiosity creeping inside him, the last piece of advice Baekhyun receives makes it grow bigger and adds some confusion to the mix, and as the shrill voices begin to fade he starts to acknowledge sounds he hadn’t paid attention to before. There’s thumping and dragging and cracking, and the unmistakable cries of sirens in the distance. He smells gasoline and smoke, too, and this time around he succeeds in opening his eyes at last but the sight that greets him is not the one he expected to see.

Before him there is no garden—it’s a long and narrow corridor that seems to extend for what could be kilometers; numbered doors coated in chipping white paint and red lightbulbs line up along the naked concrete walls, and while most of them work perfectly there are some that keep flickering and cast oddly shaped shadows on the ground. He turns around and the blood drains from his face upon seeing that the corridor also extends behind him in the same way as it does before him, with the exception that the doors have no knobs and the copper numbers on them are upside down.

“Jongin?” He whispers, hoping that the man with pink hair and feline green eyes will materialise out of nowhere and shed some light on the situation. Deep inside, though, he knows that he won’t show up. “Hello? Anyone?”

Gulping, Baekhyun hesitantly step forwards and is then that he realises a rather small but significant detail: his clothes are different—moreover, he’s clothed. Someone has dressed him up in a rather interesting attire, replacing his white tee with a black rayon patterned blazer layered over a silk cobalt dress shirt, and he must admit that he’s thankful to whoever took the time to slip those black leather pants and combat boots on him because the idea of facing the End of the World barefoot and in underwear was one he didn’t fancy.

“Where do you come from?” Baekhyun looks up from his feet, taken aback by the sudden question made by an unknown voice, and his eyes double in size when they fall on the figure before him sitting cross-legged on a golden throne with his elbows propped atop his knees and face resting on his hands. “And where are you going? Look up, speak nicely, and don’t twiddle with your fingers all the time.”

The voices from earlier had told him about a flower whose shape resembled his own roaming about and he’d assumed they were talking about a female, but everything points towards the person on the throne being male. He’s wearing a scarlet velvet court coat over an embroidered white collarless satin waistcoat with trousers to match, a golden crown embellished with almandine and topazolite garnet stones resting on his head. Thick black locks have been pushed away from his face, although some stray hairs have managed to find their way back across his forehead, and the red eyeshadow and black eyeliner combo he’s wearing makes his round caramel eyes stand out over the rest of his features—except, perhaps, those lips of his stained in the same shade of red. 

“Well?”

Baekhyun flinches, having forgotten that he’d been asked questions, and promptly straightens his back and squares his shoulders. “I don’t know how I got here, nor do I know where I’m going. Whenever I close my eyes, I wake up in a different place. Before I came here I was in a garden, and I know this because I could smell the flowers and the grass.”

“You couldn’t have been in a garden,” the man in red cuts him off, “because there are none left. We tried to save them but it was too late, and the fire swept away with everything. Roses, dahlias, camellias, daisies…you name it, they’re all gone.”

“He—Jongin told me to go forth into yesterday.” Baekhyun continues, lightly furrowing his eyebrows. “And a man named Junmyeon said I was late. He said that the Time’s been in a bad mood and it was all some Sehun guy’s fault.”

The man in red heaves out a sigh and shakes his head, which makes his crown slide slightly to the right. “Those two are always quarrelling and getting on each other’s nerves. Did you say it was Jongin who told you to go forth into yesterday?”

“Yes, but I don’t know what that means.”

“That’s an easy one, child!” The man in red does a dismissive wave with a hand, as if the meaning of such a confusing instruction had been crystal clear all this time. “It means that you ought to retrace your steps if you want to get somewhere.”

“But I don’t want to get anywhere,” Baekhyun retorts, “I want to go back where I came from.”

“That still counts as going somewhere. What is your destination? Take a minute to reflect on it.”

Baekhyun reluctantly agrees, but only because he does need some help and this man could hold the answers to his questions and thus the key to go back to his own world before this one ends. Reflect. Reflection. Don’t mirror reflect things, too?

“The bathroom mirror!” Baekhyun exclaims, smacking himself on the forehead for taking so long to remember how he’d gotten there. It’s still hard to believe, but it’s the only explanation to all the weird phenomena happening around him. “What does that mean?”

“It means that everything here goes the other way. You know how mirrors work, right?” The lights flicker again as the man in red stands up from his throne, and Baekhyun gasps in shock when they stabilize and he finds that the floor of the corridor they’re in is covered in carnations. “Up is down and left is right… but is it right to lose your head over unrequited love?”

Baekhyun arches a brow. “I beg your pardon?”

“Once upon a time, a benevolent Queen ruled this land. She had beauty and she had grace, and her heart was so big that eventually she began wearing it on her sleeve—why, you see, she had her maids embroider hearts into all her gowns—but alas, this eventually turned against her.”

“What about the King?”

The man in red bends down to pick up a carnation from the thousands by their feet, bringing it to his nose to smell it. “There was none. When a Queen is enough, a King becomes unnecessary. The Queen is the most powerful piece in chess, after all. Besides, she didn’t wish for one.”

“Did you say that she lost her head?” Baekhyun asks, encouraging the man in red to continue with the story.

“Figuratively and literally. She fell in love with someone whose heart she couldn’t have. The object of her affection was going to marry a locksmith that Summer, and she couldn’t stand the thought of not being able to claim the only thing she’d ever wanted so bad.” The man in red sets on plucking the petals of the carnation, one by one. “She tried to court her, but got rejected every time. How does one pick a commoner over a Queen? She would often go on ranting sprees when she thought no one was listening, until her madness consumed her. She had the couple arrested and beheaded the day prior to their wedding, but the news spread like wildfire and she was taken to trial for what she did.”

“What was she accusing them of?”

“Theft. She claimed to have seen them lurking about the palace before some of her belongings went missing, and it might’ve worked if she hadn’t accidentally revealed that she did it as revenge.” The man in red frowns, then his expression softens again. “They locked her up until trial day.”

Baekhyun shakes his head as he bends down to pick up a flower for himself, and this time he isn’t even shocked when he finds that they’re all gone and the floor is naked linoleum again. “Served her right. What happened next?”

“She was found guilty, of course, and sentenced to death. Can you guess how she died?”

“Beheaded?” Baekhyun ventures.

The man in red smiles. “No one knows what her obsession with beheading people was. Some say that she was looking for her lost sanity, but I think she just went bonkers and genuinely enjoyed cutting people’s heads off. Jongin thinks so, too.”

A thunder roars in the distance and more sirens follow suit, but the man in red remains calm despite. How is everyone he comes across so nonchalant about the End of the World? This isn’t even Baekhyun’s world and he’s already at the verge of a nervous meltdown, but he can’t afford to bid farewell to his sanity and succumb to despair just yet. At least not until he gets some of the answers to the questions swirling around his head.

“What does the Queen’s story have to do with me, anyway?” Baekhyun asks a little more impatiently, flinching when another thunder shakes the ground and makes the lights flicker again.

“Mirrors are very powerful, you know. Rumour has it that she built a secret chamber in her palace—a room full of mirrors, to be exact—where she would spend hours by herself. They said that she stared at her reflection for so long that it often led to hallucinations and resulted in her not being able to recognise herself anymore.” Says the man in red, a quiet snicker following his words. “You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all this, are you not? Well, you said you came here through a mirror and the only way for you to go back is through _another_ one. The bad news is that all mirrors were destroyed and banned after the Queen’s meltdown.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“The good news is that some were spared,” Baekhyun opens his mouth but the man in red lifts a hand to silence him, “but Time isn’t on your side and our world is crumbling down by the second: it’s ripping apart at the seams and soon it’ll be no more than a shred of what was once our beautiful land; we don’t have the power to stop what’s happening but maybe we’ll live on in a memory of yours.”

Baekhyun’s heart sinks upon hearing these words of resignation spill from the red lips of such a mysterious and beautiful being, but what is he to do in this situation? His sympathy might be perceived as a burden rather than comradery and he wouldn’t want to further upset anyone, for they already had enough on their plates with their world ending, and he was basically an outsider with no knowledge of the way things worked around here. He’s powerless, and thus frustrated.

“There used to be a train that would take you round the country, but it broke down and now the tracks are out of use and lead to nowhere so I wouldn’t advice you to follow them, lest you want to risk ending up getting lost. Look for the twins into the woods, instead. They’ll help you find your way.” The man in red says as he steps closer to Baekhyun, rolling something between his hands. He smells like earth and sweet rose-infused coconut milk with a hint of gunpowder. “They’ll take you where the mirror is, and then it’s all up to you. Now pay attention: run down the corridor as fast as you can and, when you feel like you’ve reached your limit, run faster.”

“But—”

“All the running will make you thirsty.” The man in red takes hold of Baekhyun’s hand and places something on his palm, but doesn’t give the latter enough time to examine the object before curling his fingers back round it and leaning in to brush his red-stained lips against Baekhyun’s. He can’t think of any explanation to what just happened so he decides to let it be. “Remember who you are.”

Baekhyun’s heart skips a beat and his stomach churns in dread as an unpleasant, cold sensation starts creeping up his legs and spreads through the rest of his body, clogging up his throat and making his eyes watery. A warm gush of air hits him on the back of his neck and he cranes his neck over his shoulder, his eyes going wide upon spotting the flames quickly consuming everything on their wake. The air smells of burnt wood and hopelessness. (Kind of like crude oil, Baekhyun thinks.)

“Wait, who are you?”

“I’m Red,” the man answers without missing a beat, as if he’d been waiting for Baekhyun to pop the question. “I’m energy and passion; blood and fire; anger and danger; love and lust. I’m strawberries and roses; hearts and rubies; and the colour of raw meat. My name is Kyungsoo, and now I shall bid you farewell. You’ll know when to stop running. Good-bye!”

Baekhyun runs, and Kyungsoo goes off with a boom.

 

+++

 

It’s hard to accurately tell what time it is and how long it’s been since Baekhyun barely managed to escape from the flames through a trapdoor (that’s how he learned he’d been underground all along) but the sun is still up in the dull and grey sky when he decides to take a break after aimlessly wandering about for what must’ve been hours. He collapses against a tree trunk and slides all the way down to the ground, wiping the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve and swiping his tongue across his lips to wet them, deciding to examine the token Kyungsoo had given him before he blew up along his throne. He said it’d quench his thirst after all the running he did but he couldn’t fathom how the spherical object sitting on his palm could do that.

It’s a small ball, about the size of a marble, streaked with red and pink and Baekhyun is sure that he’s seen these colours before, but his brain can’t make a connection right now; it possesses no smell whatsoever, but when he pops it into his mouth and swirls his tongue around it he can taste aloe Vera juice and rosemary. When he bites down on it and the ball unfolds into separate thin, velvety layers, he realises that he’s eating the rolled petals that Kyungsoo plucked off the carnation he was holding earlier.

“The twins, Baekhyun. You need to find the twins.” The redhead reminds himself as he reluctantly pushes himself off the ground once he’s done eating the rolled petals (surprisingly, they did quench his thirst) and rolls his shoulders to release some of the increasing tension in his body, dusting off grass blades and dirt off his clothes. “Now, where am I?”

That’s the big question whose answer Baekhyun has been trying to find and still hasn’t come across, though he’s hopeful that the quest he’s about to go on will shed some light onto this confusing situation and help him escape from the whirlwind he got caught into. Junmyeon said this was the End of the World, but _what_ world was he referring to? Kyungsoo talked about mirrors and how everything worked different here —where up was down and left was right— and about a Queen who lost her head because her heart wasn’t in the right place. He’d even helped him figure out how he got here and how to go back, but there are still many pieces missing and Baekhyun doesn’t think he’s got enough time to go and try to collect them.

If everyone here has gone bonkers and he’s as mad as Jongin claimed, maybe he ought to play by the rules of this place and relinquish some of his own sanity. 

_Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!_  
_How I wonder what you’re at!_  
_Up above the world you fly,_  
_Like a tea tray in the sky._

Baekhyun stops on his tracks to listen, perking up his ears and holding his breath as he surveys his surroundings, trying to find the source of the voice but all he can hear is his own breathing and the palpitations of his heart. He doesn’t sense any danger nearby —neither lurking behind naked tree trunks nor hiding beneath moss covered rocks— but he knows that he’s not alone and the sensation of being watched is unnerving. Ten minutes later find him walking out of the woods, at last, but the relief that washed over Baekhyun immediately fades and is replaced with dread when he realises where he is. The sky is still grey above his head, the ground beneath his feet is rocky and his heart drops to his stomach when he realises he’s standing on the railway tracks that Kyungsoo had mentioned to him earlier.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!  
How I wonder what you’re at!”

The voice is coming from underneath. Baekhyun yelps in alarm when something coils around his right ankle and he jumps back to create some distance between him and whatever that thing is, clasping a hand over his mouth to muffle a scream when he spots the long and bony fingers peeking from between the pebbles on the ground. Colourful rings adorn the base of the fingers while the tips are dyed black, as if they’d been dipped in ink, and Baekhyun wonders who is the owner of the hand and what they’re doing underground.

“Up above the world you fly,  
Like a tea tray in the sky.”

Baekhyun crouches down and taps the wiggling fingers, eliciting a surprised gasp from their owner who promptly draws them back. He smiles, amused. “Hello.”

“Who is this?”

“Just a passerby.” The redhead answers with a shrug, biting his bottom lip. “What are you doing there?”

There’s some muffled rustling and coughing and dragging coming from beneath his feet, but Baekhyun doesn’t dare ask what’s going on. He waits despite his curious nature, and nearly falls on his bum when the pebbles start to quiver before a hole opens on the ground and an actual head emerges from it, covered in chalk dust and dirt, and then he’s looking straight into a pair of sharp eyes with different coloured irises. The right one is an icy blue while the left is hazel with pink smudged around the pupil, and Baekhyun had never seen anything like it before.

“I fell.” The man simply says as a belated response to Baekhyun’s question, pushing himself up and onto the pebbled ground with some effort that leaves him a tad breathless. He’s at least a head taller than Baekhyun and his shoulders are broad and, despite possessing very sharp features and the intimidating height, the boyish smile that blossoms across his face immediately puts the redhead’s heart at ease.

The first thing that Baekhyun notices once the chalk dust and dirt are dusted off is his singular taste in clothing, because this man is wearing the most colourful attire out of the ones he’s seen so far: the black leather shoes are nothing out of the ordinary but the white and pale rose floral-patterned trousers are quite a sight, although they’re no match against the royal blue velvet coat that he’s wearing over a plain white shirt. The turned-back cuffs of the sleeves are black fur and colourful flowers appliqués have been embroidered onto them along with some Koi fishes at the lower body, but what catches his attention is the lion head appliqué at the back flanked by gold thread embroidered leaves. 

“Who are you?” Baekhyun asks at last, cocking his head to one side and raising a brow, which earns him a lopsided grin from the tall man before him.

“Not who, but _what_. Everyone says I’m mad, therefore that’s what I should be.”

Baekhyun hums. “Are you really mad, though?”

“I should be, but it didn’t happen overnight.” The stranger shakes his head and coughs a bit, clearing his throat afterwards. “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity, until the edges became too blurry for me to tell apart fantasy from reality. Madness isn’t like baking cookies, you know? You can’t just grab a cutter and make five identical shapes out of the same dough; you can bake them all in the same tray, but there won’t be two of the same.”

“That’s the weirdest analogy I’ve ever heard.” Baekhyun says. “What are you made of?”

“Lemon zest, tea and biscuits. Probably.”

Something clicks inside Baekhyun’s head and he slowly nods, rocking to-and-fro on his feet. “Are you Sehun, by any chance?”

“You can call me that, if you may. Who told you?” Sehun narrows his eyes and Baekhyun opens his mouth to answer, but another voice beats him to it. 

“Hey, what kind of a cat can grin?” Jongin is hanging upside down from the branch of a nearby tree with his arms dangling at either side of his head and oversized sweater bundled around his armpits, leaving his midriff and chest exposed. He rocks his upper body back and forth a couple times and then climbs back onto the branch with incredible agility, grinning down at the other two men as he swings his legs about, kicking his feet in the air. “A catenary, obviously.”

Sehun scoffs. “I should’ve known it was—”

“What happened to Junmyeon?” Baekhyun asks as he takes a step towards the tree, furrowing his eyebrows. 

“Yeah, what happened to Junmyeon?” Sehun parrots.

“He’s alright.” Jongin responds with a nonchalant shrug, waving a hand dismissively.

“But he—” Baekhyun starts.

“He glitched.” Jongin interrupts.

“Like he did at the twins’ birthday party?” Sehun asks rather enthusiastically, making Jongin’s grin broaden. 

“Exactly like that.” The pink-haired man confirms, then adds, “He turned into a rabbit.”

“Again?”

Jongin nods and Sehun simply whistles and then shakes his head, making his dirty blond hair bounce. Baekhyun has no idea of what is going on or why the other two men are so calm about the whole situation, but knowing that this happened before and Junmyeon lived to tell the tale somehow makes him feel a bit less worried. 

Sehun shrugs. “Typical Junmyeon.”

“Fancy meeting you here again, boy.” Jongin purrs from his spot on the branch, grinning at the redhead. “I see you’ve made up your mind on which way to go.”

“I got some help, actually.” Baekhyun admits, shaking his head when he blinks and sees fire. “He said his name was Kyungsoo. He told me to look for the twins, and that they’d help me find my way back.”

Jongin nods. “Ah, Kyungsoo! Haven’t seen him in a while. How is he?”

“He…” Baekhyun hesitates to continue, but both men are waiting for an answer and it would be unfair to keep from them that information. “I’m not sure, but there was fire everywhere. He told me to run.”

Neither Jongin or Sehun say a word but they do exchange a quick glance whose meaning Baekhyun can’t interpret, and for a moment the world seems to have gone silent with them. The siren echoing in the distance proves Baekhyun’s theory wrong.

“It’s a shame. I liked him.” Jongin is the one to break the thick silence after another minute and Baekhyun gasps in surprise when he finds him standing near Sehun instead of seated atop the branch he was occupying barely a few seconds ago. He doesn’t seem to be distraught by the news, but he isn’t happy about them either. Jongin is hard to read. 

“We’re running out of time.” Says Sehun as he kicks a pebble, and three pairs of different coloured eyes follow its trajectory as it flies across the air and lands near the roots of a tree. “Maybe I shouldn’t have taunted Him.”

“I knew it had been you.”

Sehun and Jongin start to bicker but Baekhyun simply blocks them out, as he isn’t interested in taking part in whatever conversation they’re having, and keeps his eyes glued to the pebble that Sehun kicked. He doesn’t really know what he’s expecting to see there besides dirt and dead leaves, but he’s got a hunch that _something_ is about to happen and he’s wondering what it might be. He waits, and he’s about to give up and declare himself paranoid when two silhouettes emerge from behind the tree trunk and bring their hands up to cover each other’s mouths in a gesture for Baekhyun to be quiet, while beckoning him over with their free hands.

“Guys.” Baekhyun breathes out once he recovers from the initial shock but he doesn’t get acknowledged by neither Sehun or Jongin, so he tries again in a louder voice. “Guys!”

“What?” Both men growl at the redhead, clearly irritated to have had their argument interrupted, but Baekhyun ignores them for good and lifts an arm towards the woods he just escaped from, pointing at the blurry silhouettes with a steady forefinger. 

“Who are they?” 

Silence reigns over them again.

“Congratulations.” Jongin says with a hint of mockery in his voice as he moves to stand beside Baekhyun, draping an arm around his shoulders. He smells like baby powder, sandalwood and grapefruit. “Double trouble just found you.”

Baekhyun drops his arm then and his heart skips a beat when the silhouettes do the same, revealing their lop-sided grins and two sets of white teeth they’d concealed behind their hands; the grin at the left is a gummy one with the corners subtly turned downwards and the front teeth slightly larger than the rest, while the grin at the right is larger and the way the corners curl upwards adds certain mischievousness to it. The sight lasts for only a few seconds until the silhouettes begin to silently retreat into the woods (much to Baekhyun’s dismay because he’s supposed to ask them for help), and he’s about to make a run after them when two pairs of hands grab him by the arms to hold him in place. 

“Hey!”

“They’re dangerous.” Sehun says and Jongin agrees with a nod, their grip on Baekhyun’s arms tightening when the latter squirms in an attempt at setting himself free.

“Kyungsoo said that they could help me find my way back to my world! I need to talk to them.” The redhead insists but to no avail, and suddenly he feels terribly empty inside and breathing starts to get harder by the second; it’s like all his emotions are being vacuumed out of him and every breath he takes feels like hundreds of needles piercing his lungs and throat, and it’s not long until the excruciating pain he’s been subjected to becomes too much for him to bear.

Baekhyun’s head begins pounding and his hands fly up to hold it with trembling fingers as he howls in despair and agony, scared that his skull might explode otherwise, and his laments stop only when scalding vomit crawls up his throat and fills his mouth. It tastes bitter and all the unpleasant sensations bring tears to Baekhyun’s eyes as fluids continue spilling from his mouth, and he desperately wants everything to stop and his agony to end. Surprisingly, it does as soon as he wishes for it.

The blinding pain in his chest and head ebbs away and his vision clears within seconds, and when he brings a hand to his mouth to wipe off the remnants of vomit he finds that there’s none smeared on his lips nor splattered across the ground. Where did it all go?

“Is he still breathing?” Sehun asks lowly, concern evident in his voice.

“I think so.” Jongin replies in the same tone and gives Baekhyun a light shake. “Are you okay there?”

Baekhyun nods slowly and turns his head to the left to look at Jongin. “What happened?”

“You zoned out after seeing the twins. You wouldn’t be the first one to react that way, so don’t be embarrassed by it.” 

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone knows that the twins are tricksters and they like to play games.” Sehun says as he releases his grip around the redhead’s arm. Contrariwise, Jongin doesn’t let go. “I don’t understand why someone as smart as Kyungsoo would send you after them.”

“They must know something we don’t.” Sehun and Baekhyun glance at Jongin, whose smile has disappeared and been replaced with a frown, and at last he removes his hand from the redhead’s arm as a sigh pushes past his lips. “I guess we’ve got no choice but to go after them.”

“But I don’t like the twins.” Sehun mumbles under his breath as he kicks another pebble albeit with less force this time, clucking his tongue in disapproval at Jongin’s suggestion. “They always seem to be in the middle of plotting something and they’re eerie. Especially Minseok.”

Jongin pays no attention whatsoever to Sehun’s short rant and begins to decidedly walk towards the tree where they spotted the twins a few minutes ago with a confused Baekhyun on tow, and it’s only a matter of seconds for a fuming Sehun to join them on their quest. Despite having spent hours wandering around the area while trying to find a way out of it, the trees look different than the ones Baekhyun saw before and he also notices that the already weak sunlight pouring through the canopy keeps growing dimmer as they delve farther into the woods. The twins are nowhere to be found but since Jongin hasn’t said a word and doesn’t seem to be in a particularly good mood either, no questions regarding their destination are made although some glances do get exchanged between Baekhyun and the blond walking beside him.

Suddenly, Jongin stops. The other two men do the same and Baekhyun sets on scanning over the area with his eyes, noticing the change in scenery: the trees are shorter than the ones growing along the edge of the woods but their foliage is thicker, albeit not enough for them to have any visibility issues, and a bed of small plants and decomposing leaves cover the soil. That’s when Baekhyun finally sees the purple fog slithering across the clearing before them and around their ankles, then starts pondering over whether it’s poisonous and how fast it could kill them after inhaling it.

“Don’t worry, it’s harmless.” Jongin says, as if he’d just read Baekhyun’s mind, and a quick glance at Sehun is enough for the redhead to know that he’d probably been wondering the same thing. “But they aren’t. I’m sorry, but this is as far as Sehun and I can go.”

There’s that cold sensation again, like icy water travelling down Baekhyun’s spine and spreading across his chest, tugging at his heart and leaving him breathless for a second or two. The temperature around them seems to drop a degree and Baekhyun instinctively wraps his blazer tighter around himself, but the dread is harder to shake off and it clings to him. He doesn’t want his companions to part. He doesn’t want to be alone with the twins, and he doesn’t want the crushing sensation of being lost and not belonging anywhere to come back. Moreover, he doesn’t wish to bid farewell to anyone again.

“What do you mean?”

Jongin purses his lips and looks in the direction where the purple fog is coming from, then at Sehun who seems to have suddenly become interested in the intricate design of his coat and his black dip-dyed fingertips. “The twins don’t want us around. The fog is their way of telling us to stay away.”

“Then shouldn’t we all turn around and leave, if we aren’t welcome here?” Baekhyun asks, trying to conceal the hopefulness in his voice. Funny how his priorities have changed in the span of a few minutes; finding a way back home had been at the top of the list ever since he landed here, but right now all he can think about is in making Jongin and Sehun stay by his side instead of leaving him to his fate.

“The twins want you to go after them, but they don’t want us to tag along.” Sehun says, and Baekhyun can’t tell whether he’s relieved or upset by that. “Jongin is right and we can’t go any farther than this.”

Baekhyun’s heart skips a beat. He can’t believe that they’re really going to abandon him. Granted, he didn’t trust neither when they first met (and he still doesn’t) but they’re the only people around that seem to know how this strange world works and haven’t entirely lost their minds yet. Kyungsoo seemed relatively sane, too, but alas, he’s no longer around.

“You’ll be fine.” Jongin says as picks up a small pink flower from the ground and returns to Sehun’s side to tuck it behind his ear, arranging his dirty blonde hair around the ornament, and Sehun reaches up to touch it with a quiet giggle. “It’s us they don’t like, but they’re interested in you. They won’t harm you unless you provoke them.”

“I don’t want to provoke anyone.”

“Of course, you don’t.” Jongin’s slightly larger-than-average fangs pop out when he grins, sending a chill down Baekhyun’s spine. “You just want to go back home, and that’s very reasonable. Onwards you go then!”

Sehun nods. “Farewell, passerby! Ah, wait a second. What is a raven like a writing desk?”

Baekhyun blinks in confusion and then furrows his eyebrows in thought as he forces the cogs in his brain to move, but he can’t seem to come up with anything remotely acceptable for an answer to Sehun’s riddle. “I don’t know. Won’t you tell me?”

“I shall, if our paths cross again.” The blond responds and then bows at Baekhyun, peering at him through his white eyelashes with his oddly coloured eyes that are conveying more emotions and thoughts than Baekhyun is able of reading and interpreting. What is Sehun trying to tell him? “Embrace your madness.”

Why is everyone so keen on providing unrequited advice and bossing Baekhyun around? Eat me. Go forth into yesterday. Remember who you are. Embrace your madness. And yet, he’s been following through with every order given to him and now he’s all on his own again—but no one said that going back home would be an easy task or that everyone would be willing to help for free. Hopefully, the twins won’t be as terrible as Sehun and Jongin have made them seem to be.

Every step Baekhyun takes brings him closer to the twins, and the purple fog around his ankles has become so thick he can barely see his feet; he can, however, hear the dead leaves crunching beneath them along with white noise, although he doesn’t know where it’s coming from. The static in the air makes his red hair stand on edge and causes his pulse to rise, and the thickening fog forces him to squint his eyes when the visibility becomes so limited that he can no longer see what lies ahead of him. Suddenly, he steps into a clearing and breathing becomes so much easier.

There are a few radios scattered about the ground, peeking from between the roots of the trees and the grass and all of them are tuned into different frequencies: fragments of old songs and white noise fill the air that smells sweet like grapes and fresh like pine, and Baekhyun recognises his grandmother’s voice amidst all the others as the one singing a lullaby. It’s eerie, especially if the fact that it’s been a little over three years since she passed away is taken into consideration. 

Two men holding hands stand by side in the middle of the clearing with their gazes fixed on Baekhyun and, despite looking very much alike, they’re unmistakably different from each other. Both are dressed in white linen shirts and black cotton bottoms, but the twin at the right is wearing suspenders and shorts whereas the other twin opted for high-waisted pants that stop barely above his ankles. The twin with the suspenders has black hair parted in the middle and skin as pale as snow, whereas the other’s hair is a rich chocolate that falls across his forehead and over his eyes, and his skin is dewy with a subtle olive undertone. The twin at the right has a gummy smile and large incisive teeth, whereas the other’s grin resembles that of a playful feline ready to pounce on its prey. The cheeks of the twin at the right are dusted yellow and highlighted in gold, whereas the twin at the left is flushed peach across his high cheekbones and the bridge of his nose.

“Hello?” Baekhyun ventures after a moment of awkward silence, taking a hesitant step towards the twins. Are they even human, or is Baekhyun looking at the most realistic wax figures he’s sever seen? They haven’t blinked once since he arrived, so they might as well be. He extends an arm towards the twin at the right and hesitantly drags his fingertips down his cheek, and he’s surprised to find that his skin is icy cold to the touch. Is he really made of wax?

“Invading personal space like that is terribly rude. Do you not have any manners?” The twin at the left says, causing Baekhyun to jump backwards with a gasp. He draws his hand back, too, when the coldness of the man’s skin bites and burns at his fingertips. Shock morphs into indignation as the redhead rubs his fingers to warm them up, cutting a glare at the men before him.

“I could ask you the same thing. It’s not considered polite to ignore someone’s greeting and then pretend to be some sort of wax figures or mannequins for the sake of some entertainment.” Baekhyun retaliates, adjusting his clothes and rolling his neck, breathing out a long sigh afterwards. “I need to find something and Kyungsoo said you could help me.”

The twin with the black hair and fair skin breaks into a gummy smile, lightly cocking his head to one side as he studies the newcomer’s face and ponders over his words. “Kyungsoo, you say?”

Baekhyun nods.

“And who are you, we wonder?” The twin at the left asks, blowing his hair away from his eyes, and the other twin backs him up with a “yes, we do” or something along those lines.

“I’m… Uh, my name is…” Baekhyun panics when he can’t seem to remember his own name because how does one forget such an important thing? Is it Baekbom, or perhaps Baekho? What about Donghyun? Whatever. Does it matter, anyway? “I’m just a wanderer, a passerby. I’m someone who came here by accident and yearns to go back home.”

“A wanderer!” The twin at the right exclaims.

“A passerby!” Shouts the twin at the left this time, shaking his head.

“Someone who yearns to go back home!” Both twins sing-song in unison and then laugh, reaching for the redhead’s hands before starting to dance around in circles with a confused Baekhyun trying to keep up with their pace. “Yes, he does! He yearns to go back home!”

The merry-go-round abruptly comes to an end when the twins let go of Baekhyun and he tumbles backwards, falling onto his bum with a whimper when he loses his balance, and lands near a radio playing a song that he recognises as Guns ‘N Roses’ “Don’t Cry”. It was his late grandmother’s favourite.

_Talk to me softly_  
_There’s something in your eyes_  
_Don’t hang your head in sorrow_  
_And please don’t cry_

_I know how you feel inside_  
_I’ve been there before_  
_Somethin’s changin’ inside you_  
_And don’t you know_

“Kyungsoo said you’d come.” The twin with the shorts and the suspenders says, rocking back and forth onto his feet with his arms folded behind his back. “He said: ‘give him a biscuit if he’s thirsty and some tea if he’s hungry; then take him where the House of Impossibilities is.’”

The other twin nods to confirm his brother’s words. “But why should we take him there? I asked, and then he said: ‘because he’s in a state of mind that he wants to deny something—only he doesn’t know what to deny!’ We don’t know what he meant by that, but we’re supposed to take you there.”

“First things first, brother dearest.” The twin with the gummy smile chirps as he reaches into his pockets, producing a biscuit from one and a cup of tea from the other that he offers to Baekhyun. “Which one should it be?”

“Thank you, but I’d rather you take me to the House of Impossibilities that Kyungsoo mentioned.” Baekhyun says as he runs his fingers through his hair and he’s once again grateful to Kyungsoo for continuing to help him find his way back home even though he’s gone. He wishes he wasn’t, though. “I’d also like to know your names, if you have any, because calling you Twin One and Twin Two would be very rude of me.”

“Terribly rude, indeed.” The twin wearing the pants says, nodding his head a couple times for emphasis. “I’m Jongdae and this is my older brother, Minseok. Who did you say you were, again?”

Baekhyun smiles faintly and then reintroduces himself. “I’m nobody.”

“Ah.” Minseok nods and then turns to look at his brother, toying with his suspenders. “In that case, may I suggest we link arms, and that Nobody walks between us?” His words are backed with a nod from Jongdae, who promptly starts running around the clearing and picking up random items from the ground, pulling them out from behind tree trunks and even underneath large mushrooms, bringing them to the middle of it where he piles them up. His findings include two saucepans, a hot pink umbrella, a wooden sword, blankets, hearthrugs, and even a teapot, and Baekhyun is so mystified and intrigued by the assortment of objects that he ends up tripping with his own feet while walking towards the middle of the clearing. (Much to his embarrassment and he twins’ amusement, unfortunately.)

“What’s all that for?” Baekhyun asks as he gets back onto his feet and dusts off his clothes, watching the twins with interest as they begin wrapping the hearthrugs and blankets around their bodies into some sort of makeshift armors, and the redhead can’t help but laugh at he ridiculousness of the situation. In what world could these dorky and childish twins be dangerous? Sehun and Jongin must be out of their minds to think of them as such.

“What’s the purpose of an armor?” Jongdae asks as he adjusts a saucepan over his head, then proceeds to answer his own question before Baekhyun even has enough time to do so. “That’s right. Absolutely right. They’re designed to protect.”

“And these…” Minseok raises the wooden sword and the hot pink umbrella to their eye level, shaking them in Baekhyun’s face. “There are for attacking. Piercing. Slicing. Plucking eyes out!”

Jongdae nods. “We might not look like it, but we’re very skilled swordsmen. In fact, the Queen herself praised our skills once, before the Great Meltdown happened.” Both twins shake their heads, and Baekhyun doesn’t miss the mischievous gleam in Jongdae’s eyes that could be easily mistaken for insanity. “What a sad day that was! But alas, there was nothing we could’ve done to help her. Have you ever tried to reason with a mad person?”

Baekhyun averts his gaze from the twins for a moment, biting his tongue and forcing down his throat a snarky remark that would surely earn him a smack with either the wooden sword or the umbrella, best case scenario. He’d already made it this far and the twins were willing to take him to the House of Impossibilities (for reasons still unknown to him) and thus he couldn’t afford to upset them and lose them. He needed their help to find his way back home before this world ended, because he didn’t know what would happen to his real self if he died in this place. Would he die in his own world, too?

“I’ve…heard that it’s quite a difficult task, yeah.” Baekhyun says after a moment, in response to the twin’s question, and straightens up when the two men move to stand at either side of him, linking their arms together like Jongdae suggested just a moment ago.

“It’s a chore!” Minseok chirps, yielding the wooden sword in his right hand and pointing it straight ahead.

“A chore!” Jongdae agrees, lightly tugging at Baekhyun’s arm to coax him into walking with them. Truthfully, he isn’t particularly thrilled about delving into the dense purple fog and further into the words with the twins flanking his sides, but he must endure the discomfort if he wants to return home in one piece. “You know? Mad people aren’t really the issue. They know they’re insane and embrace it and live happily in the world they’ve created inside their heads without bothering anyone.”

Baekhyun frowns, barely ducking a low branch before getting impaled on it, and spends a moment pondering over Jongdae’s words in silence. “Say, is there a possibility that this world isn’t real? Could this be a dream of sorts?

“Brother dearest, did you hear?” Minseok asks mockingly, snickering to himself.

“A dream!” The other twin laughs boisterously, shaking his head as they continue walking down an invisible path that is supposed to lead them to the House of Impossibilities that Kyungsoo instructed them to take Baekhyun to—but how much could he trust the twins? For all he knew, they could be making him go around in circles to wear him off so it would be easier for them to capture him…and then what? A scary (yet plausible) possibility pops up in his head and sends a chill down Baekhyun’s spine: What if they were cannibals and intended to have Baekhyun for dinner? Oh, boy. There must be a reason why neither Jongin or Sehun felt comfortable around them, and that might also explain why the twins used the fog to keep the other two away…but maybe he’s just overthinking and they simply don’t get along well. No big deal. “And whose dream do you think this would be, mm?”

The unexpected question makes Baekhyun miss a root poking out from the ground and he stumbles, but the twins’ arms hold him up and help him regain his balance and get back on track, although his thoughts are still scattered about and he can’t seem to be able to piece them together to make any sense. No, this can’t be a dream. The unexpected grief of losing Kyungsoo and the fear and uncertainty that the twins awoke within him were very real.

“This can’t be a dream.” Baekhyun muses at last in a low voice, then shakes his head. It’s ironic for him to think like this because when he opened his eyes and found himself in this strange world, he was absolutely convinced that this was nothing but a nightmare and he’d wake up any moment. Considering everything that has happened, it’s no surprise that he no longer knows what to believe. Everything seems too real to be a mere product of his overly active imagination: the ground trembling and crumbling beneath his feet; Kyungsoo’s lips brushing against his own and the heat of the flames before they engulfed him; the smell of gunpowder and the sirens howling in the distance; the twins firmly gripping his arms and leading him through the purple fog—all those things are too vivid to not be true.

“And why not? This could be anyone’s dream, not necessarily yours.” Minseok says, and his words make Baekhyun’s heart plummet to his stomach because what if rather than having a nightmare, he’s trapped inside someone else’s dream?

Baekhyun clears his throat. “That’s ridiculous.”

“But not impossible,” Jongdae cuts in, the corners of his lips curling up when he grins. How long have they been walking already, and are they there yet? How far is the House of Impossibilities, if there is even one? Baekhyun wonders if they’ll ever get out of the woods. “Therefore, you’d be only a sort of thing in someone’s dream.”

“I shouldn’t!” He retaliates, his eyebrows furrowing. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in someone’s dream, what are you, I should like to know?”

Minseok narrows his eyes. “You know very well you’re not real.”

“I am real!” Baekhyun cries out in frustration, wriggling off the twins’ hold and setting himself free from their grasp. Neither of them looks happy. Whether this is a dream or not, and whose dream it might be, the one thing that Baekhyun is sure of is that he’s real and he exists in both this world and his own.

“There is only one thing more difficult than trying to reason with a mad person, and one thing worse than insanity.” Minseok says as he links arms with his brother again, narrowing his eyes at Baekhyun. His playfulness from earlier is gone and has been replaced with an icy cold stare that makes the redhead lean back and shrink in fear. “Do you know what that is?” 

“N-no, I have no idea.”

“An obviously mad person in denial of their own insanity.” The twins say in unison, taking a step towards Baekhyun. Are they talking about him? It can’t be. Besides, he is neither mad nor in denial—he’s simply confused and sceptic and he wouldn’t be surprised if the twins were just playing with his mind and having some fun at his expense.

“Nonsense.” Baekhyun huffs.

“Sense is exactly what you aren’t making, and what you should stop looking for. You’ll only tire yourself out.” Minseok purrs as he shakes his head, a subtle pout on his lips. “Just think about it. Is this reality disguised as a dream, or a dream you are a part of and yet have managed to convince yourself that is real? That’s the question you should be pondering over.”

“Kyungsoo said I could go back to my world through a mirror.” Baekhyun insists as he straightens up and squares his shoulders to make himself look taller and bigger despite being about the same height as the twins, but then widens his eyes in alarm when Minseok raises his wooden sword and pokes at his neck with the tip of it, right below his Adam’s apple. It’s surprisingly sharp for such a roughly made weapon with no blade but Baekhyun decides to stand his ground anyway. “And I believe in him. Is the mirror he talked about in the House of Impossibilities?”

The twins exchange a quick glance.

“We know nothing about such thing.” Jongdae says after a long moment of being silent, shrugging a shoulder in apparent disinterest but Baekhyun swears he just saw his grin falter. “We’ve only been there once and as far as we know, all mirrors were destroyed and banned by the Queen.”

Baekhyun purses his lips. “I know that, but I have reasons to believe that there’s one hidden in that house. Who lives there, anyway?”

“We can’t say!” Jongdae screeches as he covers his ears and frantically shakes his head from side to side, catching Baekhyun completely off guard. The saucepan he’d been using as helmet flies off and lands near a tree, though no one bothers to go fetch it. “He doesn’t like us!”

Minseok nods frantically and his grip on the sword falters as something akin to fear flashes across his eyes. “We aren’t supposed to come near his home, or else!”

“What are you even talking about?” Baekhyun asks, perplexed and intrigued by the sudden change in the twins’ behaviour; they were fine with talking about the House of Impossibilities, but the mention of its owner seemed to have triggered something within them that they did not dare speak of. “Please, tell me. Who lives there, and is it dangerous to go inside?”

“It’s dangerous if you’re us.” Jongdae answers in a whisper, tugging at his rich chocolate locks with trembling fingers. He seems to be the most affected by the topic they’re currently discussing, but that won’t stop Baekhyun from seeking for answers and trying to get the truth out of the twins that both Sehun and Jongin warned him about. Perhaps he should’ve listened to them.

“Thank goodness I am not.” Baekhyun bites back with a snort, flinching when the tip of Minseok’s sword sinks into his flesh and a thin trail of blood drips down his neck, staining the collar of his silk cobalt dress shirt. That’s how he learns that the wood somehow transformed into a sharp blade made of solid steel that could easily slit his throat. (The fear must be making him suffer from hallucinations, too, because he can clearly hear the Queen inside his head yelling “Off with his head!” at the top of her lungs.)

Minseok cocks his head to one side and narrows his eyes again as he gives the man before him a stern look. “No, you aren’t. I’ll ask one more time: who are you?”

“I am… well, me.” Baekhyun answers with as much confidence as he can muster, his Adam’s apple bobbing when he swallows. “If I’m not you or your brother or anyone else, then I must be me. Doesn’t that make perfect sense? Who could I be, if not myself?”

The twins look at each other again and Jongdae shuffles closer to Minseok to discuss something in whispers, and Baekhyun can’t help but feel somehow satisfied to have at least managed to turn he tables and plant the seed of doubt in the twins’ heads. (Wouldn’t that make him as mad as them, though?) They’re still chatting among themselves when a round, red bright object flies across the air and lands on Jongdae’s head, bouncing against his chocolate locks before falling to the ground by his feet. 

Minseok frowns and lowers his sword a bit while inspecting the object, giving it a light tap with the tip of his foot before crushing it with the heel, splattering red over the grass and fallen leaves.

“It was just a cherry.” He informs, and the next thing Baekhyun knows is that there are dozens of berries raining over the shocked twins; he identifies them as blueberries, cherries, raspberries, strawberries and cranberries, all of them filling the air and leaving purple and red stains on the twins’ faces and clothes. There is no logical explanation to this strange phenomenon but perhaps looking for one is exactly what he shouldn’t do; besides, the berries raining over the twins are creating a distraction big enough to allow Baekhyun to escape from the sharp blade in Minseok’s hand and dash through the trees, opting to abandon the main road despite the invisible dangers lurking around the woods. 

He doesn’t know where he’s going but anywhere should be better than being with the twins, whose intentions with him remain unclear and playing their game any longer could result in Baekhyun’s beheading. Oh, goodness. Just the thought of it makes him feel sick and nauseated, and the fear that the twins might be right behind him compels him to push himself to the limit and run faster, until he falls short of breath and the burn in his thighs becomes too much and he’s forced to slow down.

The woods are quiet, except for the retching sounds made by Baekhyun as he vomits and the sirens echoing in the distance right after another explosion goes off and a thick column of fire and smoke rises into the sky, as the reminder of the inexorable fate that would catch up to him sooner or later lest he made it to the House of Impossibilities on his own and went through the mirror that would send him back home, to the world he belonged in. The odds aren’t in his favour and there is so much at stake –his life, for example—, and he has yet to figure out whether he’s stuck in a dream or a distorted version of reality, but he can’t fathom the thought of standing there and not even trying to save his ass. 

_Think. You got this._

But the harder Baekhyun tries to come up with answers, the more hopeless and exhausted he feels. It all comes crashing down on him and tears begin pouring from his eyes to wash away all his woes and fears, and for the first time since he set foot in this place he takes a minute to be grateful for being alive. He could’ve died in that quake that triggered Junmyeon’s glitch or consumed by the flames alongside Kyungsoo, or had his throat slit by Minseok’s sword. 

“Oh, please don’t do that!” Cries a voice that Baekhyun isn’t familiar with, though it doesn’t raise any red flags inside his head. (Oddly so.) Sniffling, he looks up from his lap and the first thought he has upon seeing the man peeking from behind a tree trunk is that he must’ve died and an _angel_ came to offer him some solace and collect his poor and lost soul to take it to Heaven. “Consider what a great man you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come today. Consider anything, only don’t cry!”

“Am I dead?” The redhead asks dumbly, tears clinging to his eyelashes and staining his cheeks, tilting his head and narrowing his eyes some to get a better view of the man’s face. Whoever this is, he senses no danger coming from him; rather, his presence makes Baekhyun feel safe.

The mysterious man blinks and slowly shakes his head. “No.”

“Can you really keep from crying by considering things?” Baekhyun asks, suddenly curious.

“That’s the way it’s done.” The man answers, as if he were trying to explain the difference between apples and pears to a child. “Nobody can do two things at once, you know. Let’s consider your identity to begin with—who are you?”

“I’m nobody.”

“A Nobody among us!” The man exclaims, clapping his hands excitedly as he beams at Baekhyun and steps out from behind the tree. He’s wearing white from head to toe, which further accentuates his striking resemblance to an angel despite his claims of being only human and having reassured Baekhyun that no, he didn’t die. Sharp collarbones and a black leather harness peek out from under the deep low-cut of a white suit jacket that he’s wearing directly over his bare torso, and Baekhyun winces upon realising that what he thought was a silver necklace around the man’s neck is actual tiny diamonds embedded into his skin. White slacks complement the beautifully tailored suit jacket, and Baekhyun notices upon further inspection the gems stuck to the inner corners of his eyes and the gold stripe along his upper lid, and catches himself staring at the deep dimple that appears on his right cheek when he smiles. “It’s my first time meeting a Nobody, because everyone around here is Someone. They all have names and sometimes it’s hard to remember them, you know?”

Baekhyun nods. Forgetting is easy in this world, and he’s seen so many faces and learned so many names that he’s begun to forget his own. Would he recognise himself if he looked at his reflection, or would he see nothing but a nameless stranger?

“Well, I used to be Someone but I can’t seem to remember who I was before I came here.” Baekhyun says, glancing down at his hands as he curls and unfurls his fingers. “I’ve forgotten my name, thus I’m currently a Nobody.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a Nobody.” The man in white says, offering a reassuring smile at the redhead and his hand for him to shake. “I used to be ruler of a kingdom and everyone there called me King, but since they’re no longer around and I lost my crown I’m back to being Yixing. Just Yixing. Why are you here, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I was trying to get somewhere but I’m afraid I no longer can rely on my guides and I’m lost. I’m exhausted and sad and all I want to do is go home, take a bath and sleep.” Baekhyun explains, wondering if the man’s dark hair feels as soft as it looks. “I just don’t know how to get there, and I’m afraid I might never find my way out of here.”

Yixing cocks his head and stares at the redhead for a moment, stepping forwards to help him off the ground. “Maybe you aren’t wishing hard enough. Where are you headed to?”

“The House of Impossibilities.” Baekhyun says quietly as he takes the man’s hand and uses it as leverage to hoist himself up, blowing his red bangs out of his face when he heaves out a sigh. “I have no idea of where it is and I don’t have a map, either. Won’t you help me get there?”

Yixing suddenly cups Baekhyun cheeks with his hands and squishes them together, his laughter echoing through the otherwise silent forest. “You don’t need a map for that! Why, the House of Impossibilities itself isn’t _really_ there. You must wish hard enough for it to appear before your eyes. Did no one tell you that?”

“Uh…” Baekhyun hesitates, then shakes his head. “No, they must’ve forgotten to mention that teeny tiny detail. How does the wishing thing even work, anyway?”

“It’s easy. First, you draw a long breath. Then, you shut your eyes.” Yixing explains and demonstrates simultaneously, cracking an eye open to look at Baekhyun. “Finally, you have to wish hard and believe. That’s the most important step. Why don’t you give it a go?”

“There’s no use trying.” Baekhyun says as he waves off the man’s suggestion with a sigh. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

The man huffs. “I daresay you haven’t had much practice, then! Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” He says with a wide grin that makes that lovely dimple appear on his cheek again, and he sounds so convincing and proud of his achievements that Baekhyun allows himself to believe that maybe this one thing isn’t impossible. What has he got to lose if he gives it a go, anyway?

“So, do I just take a long breath and then close my eyes?”

Yixing nods, “Don’t forget to believe in possibilities. If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”

When Baekhyun opens his eyes again, he finds himself standing in the middle of a maze with Yixing standing beside him and tall bushes growing at their sides, with colourful flowers and fairy lights threaded through the twigs to light up their way, almost as if whoever set this up had been awaiting their arrival. A clumsy dragonfly bumps against Baekhyun’s nose and the redhead shoos it away with a wave of his hand, and his gaze finally falls on the two-story building rising at the center of the maze with its concrete walls painted a pale yellow and tiled roof, its windows facing the North and West.

He doesn’t need to see the house to know that the front door was painted last summer in a deep, toasty orange, and that there are a couple pots of Chinese evergreen sitting next to it along an empty bird cage hanging from the ceiling of the porch; he knows how many rooms are in there and that the bathroom light on the second floor doesn’t work. Why does he know all this? That’s simple: he grew up in that house.

“This,” Yixing starts, grinning as he twirls about with his arms extended at his sides, and Baekhyun notices upon glancing downwards the trail of flower buds he’s leaving behind as he walks, “is the beauty in being mad. The End of the World is happening out there, yet you’ve created all this simply by wishing it and believing that it was possible.”

Baekhyun wants to protest and object that no, he is _not_ out of his mind like everybody else here… but he honestly doesn’t know what to believe anymore. He’s beginning to make sense out of the things that seem to lack of it, and he briefly wonders if this isn’t a dream but rather a visual representation of his current mental state. Is he really losing his mind? Is everyone here a mere figment of his imagination? Or are they old friends whose faces and names he forgot, just like his own? 

“There have been strange occurrences happening all around.” Yixing says as they walk through the maze that leads to the house located in the center of it, locking his wrists behind his back. “The End of the World isn’t just about entire towns being swallowed into the ground or swept away by giant waves—it’s also affecting the inhabitants of this world, causing glitches in our behaviour.”

 _Glitches._ Now that sparks Baekhyun’s interest because he can clearly recall Jongin and Sehun talking about how Junmyeon had glitched again, just like he did at the twins’ party. He now regrets not having asked further questions regarding the incident, but he guesses that it’s too late for that, now.

“What do you mean?” Baekhyun asks, shooting a glare at the lousy hydrangea making fun of his red hair. (“Look at you! Is that fire on your head? Are you burning? Hurry and put it out! A bucket of water should help, but it must be icy cold!”)

“I mean what I mean.” Yixing muses, and the diamonds adorning his neck shimmer when he moves. “And glitching means temporarily slipping into a state of mind where you’re not yourself and you can’t control your impulses, either. You forget who you are, and telling apart right from wrong becomes almost impossible. Friend or foe? Red or blue? In or out? Real or not real? Everything loses sense as your mind begins to race and you slowly surrender to your inner madness crawling its way out, taking over you.”

Baekhyun gulps. “That sounds…painful. And disturbing.”

Yixing nods and heaves out a sigh, “A glitch can last from a few seconds to whole days, and everyone’s symptoms are different.”

“Did Kyungsoo ever glitch, too?”

“Why, yes, and his case was an extraordinarily weird one!” Yixing says, eyes going wide as he nods, gaze shooting upwards as he recalls the incident. “You see, I invited him over to my humble home for his opinion on a certain matter—whether rhubarb and strawberry pie was tastier than apple crumble, or not—and when we served dinner he refused to eat unless we brought him raw meat, all while staying calm and polite and keeping a straight face. When we denied his request, he didn’t make a fuss out of it. He just nodded, as if he’d been expecting that to happen, and…”

Baekhyun waits for Yixing to continue, then pushes on. “And then?”

“Then he began nibbling at his own arm, just like a hungry dog that finds a bone at a side of the road. We managed to stop him before he injured himself, and five minutes later he was back to normal, eating buttered peas and pork pies.” Yixing explained with a mixture of intrigue and disgust on his face, his cheeks going pale and eyebrows furrowing. “It was terribly unpleasant to witness and I haven’t stopped wondering ever since, what could’ve happened if we hadn’t stopped him?”

“That would’ve been disastrous.”

Yixing nods. “Disastrous, indeed! Do you know how difficult it is to regrow body parts? Moreover, blood leaves awful stains and I wasn’t going to let my favourite tablecloth get ruined. Oh, we’re here!”

As expected, Baekhyun isn’t surprised in the slightest when the house of his childhood days greets him when they reach the center of the maze. It looks about the same as the last time he saw it. Baekhyun’s heart skips a beat as he crosses the threshold and steps into the dimly lit house, finding comfort in the creaking of the wood panels beneath his feet and the dust particles waltzing in the rays of sunlight that pour in through the blinds, and a fond smile spreads across his face at the sight of the white and blue rug underneath the coffee table in the living room. He steps closer and easily spots the purplish stain from that time he accidentally spilled grape juice on it.

“You’re late. Again.” Says a voice at their right, and Baekhyun whips his head so fast that he pulls a neck muscle and goes cross-eyed for a second. A man with platinum hair and pink eyes is watching them from the dining table, where a white porcelain tea set and an assortment of pastries and sweets sit before him. His cheeks are a bit pale and his fingers tremble some when he brings the teacup to his lips to sip from it, and Baekhyun notices that his left eye hasn’t stopped twitching. “What a terrible habit you’ve chosen to pick up.”

“Junmyeon!” Baekhyun exclaims, relief washing over him and eyes filling with mirth and hope.

The blond hums and lowers his tea cup, taking his time to pick a pastel pink macaron from a plate filled with the confectioneries. “I see you’ve met Yixing.”

“The twins were giving him a hard time.” The man in white explains, smiling kindly at Junmyeon. “So, I made berries rain over them.”

Baekhyun widens his eyes. “Was that you?”

“Me and my loyal Knight were taking a stroll along the outskirt of the woods when we heard a commotion.” Yixing says as he approaches the table and takes a seat at Junmyeon’s left, picking a pineapple tart for himself. “He offered to investigate but I told him to stay there, for his turn to make a move would come soon and thus had to keep his eyes open.”

“The twins said that they couldn’t come near this place because the owner didn’t like them.” Baekhyun muses after a moment, declining with a shake of his head the tart that Yixing was offering him. “I’m trying to connect the dots but I can’t find any—” 

Suddenly, a tall man with pink hair and long legs waltzes into the room balancing a cake in his hands and everyone goes silent. Seeing another familiar face brings joy to Baekhyun’s heart and he finally moves over to the table to join the others, smiling faintly when he notices that Jongin used sparklers instead of birthday candles for the cake.

“What is it?” Jongin purrs as he sets down the dessert after pushing away some plates and cups to make room for it, lighting the sparklers as an excited Yixing claps. “Cat got your tongue?”

Junmyeon clears his throat to get Jongin’s attention, the emerald green fabric of his waistcoat pulling around his shoulders when he straightens his back, shooting Jongin a disapproving look. “This is no time for games and celebrations, Jongin.”

“Still talking so carelessly about time?” The man with the Kohl-rimmed green eyes and unmatchable grace says, dragging his words some. “No wonder He doesn’t take you seriously anymore and refuses to take you off his black list.”

“Time has been glitching lately, too.” Yixing interjects before a flushed Junmyeon can retaliate, cutting the cake and serving three slices that he passes around and then a fourth one that he keeps for himself. “So, it’s not Junmyeon’s fault. At least not entirely.”

“Thank you! At last, someone with a functional brain.” 

Fed up and tired of being ignored, Baekhyun reaches for the knife and stabs the leftover cake with it, splattering about some frosting and almost knocking over the teapot, but thankfully Yixing manages to hold it in place. “Everyone here has issues, alright? Junmyeon has been having nervous breakdowns, Kyungsoo craved for raw meat and now he’s dead, and the twins are plain weird. Can we please just move on before we run out of time for real?”

There’s a collective hum of agreement accompanied by a few nods and Baekhyun decides that this should be enough.

“Good.” Baekhyun straightens up and crosses his arms over his chest, eyeing the men before him. “Who lives here, and why were the twins frightened of them?”

“Do you really not know whose house this is?” Junmyeon asks as he raises a brow, not looking away from Baekhyun even when Yixing reaches over for his plate and starts eating the untouched slice of cake. “Do you have any idea of who you are, or have you—”

_Crash._

Silence falls upon them again. The four men exchange wary glances while trying to figure out where the noise came from, and Yixing slowly rises from his chair with his eyes cast upwards and a finger pressed to his lips. Baekhyun’s heart is beating fast and loud, but it soon gets overpowered by the sound of thousands of colourful marbles rolling across the floor and pouring down the staircase, like water rushing in during a flood and sweeping away everything on its wake. 

Unfortunately, they happen to be in their way.

“Run!” Someone shouts, and Baekhyun doesn’t need to hear it twice to spin on his heels and dash for the front door, which refuses to open despite having had no issues when he and Yixing came in through it. Had someone locked them up inside? Oh, but why would anyone do that?

“Hey, up here!” A familiar voice urges him from the second floor and, instead of taking a moment to think about whom it belonged to and how in earth that person managed to get there so quickly without getting caught, Baekhyun decides to blindly trust it and follow its instructions. He climbs up the staircase two steps at a time, careful not to step onto any marbles (that resemble the ones he used to collect when he was younger), and finds himself into another corridor—except this is one he knows very well. The two white doors at his right lead to the master bedroom and the bathroom, where as the ones at his left belong to the rooms that he and his brother grew up in. “What are you waiting for? Hurry up!”

All doors are locked except for one. 

Baekhyun enters his old bedroom and memories from the childhood days spent there flood his head: he sees himself and his brother building blanket forts and trying to scare each other with made up ghost stories; he sees himself writing down on his journal about his first crush and how insecure his new glasses made him feel; he sees himself freaking out over his first kiss, and then crying over his first breakup a couple months later; he sees a dog named Mongryong come and go, just like a considerable number of people in his life, and finally sees himself bidding goodbye to those memories when they moved to the city and left this life behind. Shadows from the past dance right before his eyes, but the tall figure crouching next to his bed is no illusion: it’s Sehun.

_Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!_  
_How I wonder what you’re at_  
_Up above the world you fly,_  
_Like a tea tray in the sky._

__

He looks exactly like the last time Baekhyun saw him in the woods before he went on to meet the twins, but there’s something about him besides his inherent state of madness and the baseball bat in his hands that is different and makes Baekhyun’s heart skip a beat. 

“What is a raven like a writing desk?” Sehun asks in a low voice as he raises to his feet and begins making his way towards the full-length mirror, his blue velvet coat sliding down his right shoulder as he drags the baseball bat across the dusty floor, tracing shapes and leaving faint imprints of his black leather shoes on it. Right now, though, learning the answer to such a strange riddle is the last of Baekhyun’s interests.

_Mirror._

Is this the mirror that Kyungsoo talked to him about? The one that survived the Queen’s Great Meltdown and would take him back home? Inside his head, he can clearly hear Yixing instructing him to take a deep breath, close his eyes and _believe in impossible things_. He’s in the House of Impossibilities, after all, so it’s almost expected of him to wish for something that normally he wouldn’t even consider. But first, he needs to get closer to the mirror and truthfully, he’s a tad frightened by Sehun because this isn’t like him—oh, lord. Is he glitching? Or has his madness finally taken over and driven him completely insane?

“I still have no idea.” Baekhyun says after a moment of silence, trying to conceal the fear in his voice. “You said you would tell me the next time our paths crossed. Wouldn’t this be the perfect time for that?”

Sehun grins and throws his head back before bursting out laughing, running his black dip-dyed fingers through matted dirty blonde hair while carelessly swinging the bat with his other hand. Baekhyun recoils towards the wall opposite to the mirror, becoming suddenly aware of his clammy hands and quivering knees.

“I used to have a raven pet.” Sehun says, still pacing about the room. “The twins were deadly scared of the sweet thing; can you believe that? One morning I found it dead, tucked inside one of my teapots, and it made me so sad. I haven’t been the same ever since.”

Baekhyun’s eyes go wide and his face turns pale when the blond stops in front of the mirror and knocks on it with his knuckles as if to make sure that it is real the real thing, closing his eyes as he slowly leans in to kiss his own reflection. He pulls back a moment later with a light giggle, rising to his full height and shifting his stance as he curls his fingers tighter around the baseball bat, getting ready to swing.

“Sehun.” He pleads, his voice cracking as he attempts to reason with the other man as his last resort, the possibility of getting stranded forever in this world becoming realer than ever. He doesn’t want that. “Don’t.”

“The answer to the riddle from earlier is…” Sehun pauses to look at the redhead, cocking his head and fixing his blown pupils on him. “That neither of them is alive.”

Shards of glass fly across the room when Sehun smashes the mirror along with Baekhyun’s last hope of going back home with the baseball bat, laughing manically as he throws it against a wall. It bounces and lands on the glass-covered floor near Baekhyun’s feet, and he’s so enraged by Sehun’s actions that he briefly considers the possibility of using it to crack open his skull, but those thoughts are gone as soon as they came. Baekhyun has never been the type to take out his anger on other people, especially through such violent methods, and everyone around him suddenly glitching and going mad doesn’t mean he ought to do the same and relinquish whatever sanity he’s got lefts, which he’s desperately clinging to.

He'll find another way to go back. 

“You got me with that one.” Baekhyun says as calmly as he can muster, his heart pounding against his ribs and perspiration gathering on his armpits. “Do you know where we are, Sehun?”

The blond stops laughing and turns to look at Baekhyun again, narrowing his eyes at him. “Yes.”

“Then you should know that whatever impossible wish you have becomes possible here.” Baekhyun explains, trying to piece together everything he’s learned thus far in this world. “Wouldn’t you like to see your raven pet again?” Sehun nods. “All you have to do is breathe deeply, close your eyes and then wish for it to come back to life. It’ll only take a few seconds, if you follow the steps and believe in impossibilities.”

“What if nothing happens?” Sehun asks as he takes a step closer to the redhead, eyeing the baseball bat lying by his feet. “You can’t bring back the dead.”

“That’s why you _must_ believe! Normally, you couldn’t do that,” Baekhyun glances towards the door, then back at Sehun, “but here everything is possible. It sounds like nonsense, I know, but that’s where the beauty of madness lies.”

Sehun is silent for a minute while pondering over what Baekhyun just told him, and the redhead breathes out a sigh of relief when the mad man gives a nod to signal that he believes him and is willing to try out the method that Yixing taught him earlier. He doesn’t know if it will work (because, after all, you cannot brig back the dead), but at least it should buy him enough time to run out the door and flee before Sehun glitches again and things get out of control.

“Alright. First take a deep breath, and then close your eyes.” Baekhyun instructs as he makes his way towards the door, careful not to step onto any of the pieces of glass scattered over the floor. “Focus. Now make your wish. Remember to believe!”

Baekhyun is out the door as soon as Sehun closes his eyes, following Kyungsoo’s advice to run as fast as he could and then a bit faster when he became tired, not looking back even once. He’s halfway down the staircase when another earthquake strikes and shakes the ground, and Baekhyun tries to desperately get a grip on the rail when another wave of marbles comes rolling down the stairs, pushing him down a couple steps. That’s when he steps on a marble and flails his arms about while trying to fruitlessly find his balance; alas, Time is not on his side and neither is gravity, and Baekhyun ends up falling—

…

…

…

—and then he wakes up. 

Baekhyun doesn’t know where he is, but what he _does_ know is that he’s no longer at the House of Impossibilities and all danger has been left behind. His heart is still beating wildly, though, and it almost leaps out of his chest when he hears a deep chuckle coming from above but the kind blue eyes gazing down at him are quick to chase away his uneasiness and fear, tucking them underneath layers of awe. 

“Am I dreaming?” He asks the stranger, who simply offers a hum in response. 

“If you don’t know, neither do I.” The man answers with a smile as he pushes some of his unruly brunette tresses out of his face, exposing his ears that are slightly larger then average and end in a pointy tip. Baekhyun belatedly acknowledges that he’s resting on his lap with his thighs cushioning his head, but this position is so comfortable that Baekhyun decides to stay there. The man doesn’t seem bothered, either, so he guesses that this is alright. “What do you think?”

Somehow, he knows that this man won’t mock him or make fun of his thoughts, regardless of how silly they might sound, and thus decides to trust him and speak freely about what’s on his mind. He tells him about how he came upon the trinket box with the cupcake, and how he’d gone through the mirror in the bathroom of his hotel room; he tells him about Jongin and Junmyeon glitching, and about Kyungsoo and the rolled flower petals that he gave him; he tells him about Sehun and Jongin warning him about the twins, and also about his encounter with them; he tells him about kind Yixing in white and the House of Possibilities that was the place where he grew up in, and about the marbles and Sehun smashing the mirror in his old bedroom. The man listens in silence, nodding his head or holding his breath whenever he deems it fit, and smiles gently at Baekhyun once he’s done and takes a minute to catch his breath and sort himself out.

“I think that this is not a dream, but rather a memory.” The redhead muses after a moment of silence, rolling off the man’s lap and sitting up to check his surroundings, expecting to find the world consumed by chaos and destruction; instead, he learns that they’ve left the forest behind and are now on a hill, and there are patches of daisies and baby’s breath growing around them. The man sitting next to him has broad shoulders and long limbs, which allows Baekhyun to easily estimate his height, and the small diamond adorning his left earlobe sparkles whenever a ray of sunlight falls onto it. “Who are you?”

“Yixing sent me.” He explains, and Baekhyun widens his eyes upon hearing the familiar name. “He said it was my turn to move, and that I should keep you safe. My name is Chanyeol.”

 _A knight in shining armour._ Would it be okay to think of him like such, even though he isn’t wearing an armour and possesses no sword? Just like Kyungsoo, he’s wearing an uniform of sorts except his is all white fabric and the design is not as intricate, and Baekhyun can’t help but think that it resembles that of the Royal Guard (sans the funny looking hat, thankfully). The buttons and other small details are all made of silver, including the rings around his fingers and the tiny spade pinned to the front of his coat.

“Are Yixing and the others dead?”

The man named Chanyeol shrugs and heaves as sigh as he gazes towards the horizon, his smile faltering. “It’s hard to tell. There is nothing beyond those trees anymore, and this hill is all that’s left of this world’s untainted beauty.”

“As much as being here frightens me, I’m sad that of this will disappear soon.” Baekhyun says, looking at the outskirts of the forest and then at the man seated beside him, wondering what his fate will be. 

“You are sad,” Chanyeol says, offering a gentle smile to Baekhyun. “Let me sing you a song to comfort you and take away the darkness lurking into your heart. Why, there is no point in worrying over the inevitable so come lay your head on my lap and close your eyes, and you’ll see how you feel better when you wake up again!”

Baekhyun goes to sleep with a sigh and a light heart, lulled by the Knight’s voice and the sweet lyrics of his song, the corners of his lips curling upwards when long fingers thread through his hair and make him forget about the imminent End of the World and how they were trying to make the wait bearable by counting their blessings and finding the beauty amidst the filth, instead of letting the hopelessness and sadness defeat them.

When Baekhyun wakes up a while later he does it with a gasp, coughing when smoke fills his lungs. He’s quick to rise to his feet, alarmed by the flames consuming everything around him and the loud creaking of wood as it burns, and the first thing he does is look for any signs of Chanyeol’s whereabouts because he isn’t there anymore. How long did he sleep? When did the fire start? Where is Chanyeol? The questions keep piling up in Baekhyun’s head as he starts making his way down the hill to put some distance between him and the fire, but what he finds there is that Chanyeol is standing in the middle of the field with his eyes closed and his arms dangling lifelessly by his sides, seemingly unaware of the chaos around him.

“Chanyeol?” Baekhyun shouts, unable to get any closer to the man due to the burning grass and fallen branches between them, and his blue eyes are like a breath of fresh air and a gulp of cold water amidst the heat. “What’s going on?”

The Knight smiles and gives a light shrug accompanied by a quiet sigh, “It’s time for you to go.”

“What? Why?”

“The world is glitching again.” He pauses and then shakes his head, biting his lower lip. “No, not only the world. I’m glitching, too, so I won’t be able to protect you when the End comes. I’m sorry.”

Baekhyun shakes his head and takes a step forward, but immediately jumps back when the wind carries smoke and ashes his way, making more tears well up in his eyes and sending him into another coughing fit. “What about you?”

Chanyeol takes a moment to ponder over the question thrown at him, looking around with glazed eyes as he contemplates his fate. He speaks calmly, softly, as if he were reciting a line from a poem instead of talking about a departure. “I’m part of this world, so I’ll disappear with it.”

No. Baekhyun doesn’t want anyone else to disappear, but what can he do? The world has come to this and it’s too late to try to fix whatever was wrong with it or try to find a solution—it was too late already when he arrived, anyway, like Junmyeon made sure to kindly inform him.

“Chanyeol, I need you to answer honestly.” Baekhyun says, shielding his face from the flames with his arms. If the world is really ending and Chanyeol is perishing along, then this is his last chance of getting some answers to the questions that refuse to leave him alone. Maybe the answer won’t be satisfactory—heck, Chanyeol may even refuse to say a word, but he ought to try. “Am I dreaming, or am I _remembering_ something I can’t recall happening? Are you a figment o my imagination, or a memory?”

Chanyeol cocks his head and smiles, and this time the gesture reaches his clear eyes, making them sparkle. “Didn’t Jongin tell you to go forth into yesterday?”

“Yes, but Kyungsoo said I was just meant to retrace my steps so I could find my way back home!”

“Listen. When I call your name, the End of the World will dawn upon us.” Chanyeol explains calmly as he steps to his left before a burning tree collapses onto the ground, lifting a cloud of sand and ashes that obstruct Baekhyun’s vision for a couple seconds. He blinks them away and finds with great relief that Chanyeol is still there. “It will all end when you remember who you are.”

“But how can you know who I am?” Baekhyun shouts, his voice cracking due to the smoke and emotion choking him up, threading his lithe fingers through his vibrant red hair and tugging at the roots as he shakes his head in despair. Now that the time for him to go has come, he can’t fathom the idea of turning his back on everyone who helped him and leaving empty-handed. “I don’t understand you, it’s all dreadfully confusing!”

“That’s the effect of living backwards, I’m afraid.” Chanyeol says. “It makes one giddy at first but there’s a great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.”

“I’m sure mine only works one way,” says Baekhyun in an exasperated tone, stomping on a small fire nearby to put it out, “I can’t remember things before they happen.”

Chanyeol the Knight takes a deep breath and casts one last smile as he waves good-bye, and the pain is so strong that it makes Baekhyun’s knees buckle and fills his heart with sadness, because he knows that Chanyeol is ready to call his name and bring catastrophe upon himself so he can finally go back home, to his own world. “Time is on your side now.”

Baekhyun’s heart skips a beat. He isn’t ready to go. “Is this good-bye forever?”

“I’m afraid it is,” Chanyeol confirms with a nod, his blue eyes still kind and bright and his smile gentle, as if to chase Baekhyun’s fears away and reassure him that everything would be fine even after they’ve parted ways, “but sometimes, forever is just a second. Good-bye, Baekhyun, and have a safe trip.”

Did he just call him Baekhyun? What kind of a name is that? Is it his own? Was it his mother who named him that, or did his father decide on it? Perhaps both of his parents agreed on it? Baekhyun. He tries saying it aloud but no sound is produced—instead, it’s bubbles that come out of his mouth but they’re sweet like candy instead of soapy and bitter, and Baekhyun marvels over how they don’t pop even when he pokes them. 

They float away and he takes this as his cue to leave. Baekhyun takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and makes one last wish as the smoke thickens and the flames coil around him, and vows to never forget what he saw, heard, and learned during the time spent in this twisted world. It may have ended, but he’ll make sure to keep everyone alive in his memory. (Unless they already lived there.)

_Baekhyun._

Ah. He remembers now. His name is Byun Baekhyun, born in Bucheon on May 6th, 1992. He has an older brother and is currently on a trip with a group of friends.

_Baekhyun._

Yes, yes. Five more minutes, please!

_“Baekhyun.”_

“What?” Baekhyun asks into the phone once he slips out of his reverie, pulling the device away from his ear when his friend starts whining and shouting at him from the other end of the line. The redhead glances around and is nothing short of surprised to find himself standing still in front of the shelf displaying several brands and flavours of potato chips, a half-eaten peaches and cream lollipop in his mouth. He steps backwards and lifts his gaze to the ceiling to check on the lights and maybe catch them flickering, but they all seem to be working perfectly. 

_Aisle 5. Potato chips. Organic chips. Pretzels. Popcorn. Nuts._

If he’s back in his own world… does this mean that he somehow managed to escape Wonderland—or rather, what was left of it? Granted, he’s relieved to have returned but he’d be lying if he said he isn’t also somewhat sad that he didn’t have enough time to bid a proper good-bye to any of the people he met throughout his journey. Quirky Junmyeon, brilliant Jongin, brave Kyungsoo, mad man Sehun, the prankster twins Minseok and Jongdae, wise Yixing, and the kind Chanyeol—they all went out of their way and put their own lives in danger just to help him find his way back home. How would he ever repay his debt, if he might never see them again?

 _“We don’t have the power to stop what’s happening but maybe we’ll live on in a memory of yours.”_

Kyungsoo’s words reverberate in his head and briefly sweeps Baekhyun away from his reality, taking him back to the endless corridor with the numbered door and red lights and the floor covered in carnations. Then he returns to the woods where he met the twins and got questioned about his own sanity—and he guesses that finding himself back at the convenience store means that everything was a very vivid hallucination. His heart aches at the knowledge that nothing was real, and all the people he met were but a figment of his imagination. 

If everything was inside his head… did that mean that he was the one that dreamed the dream, after all?

Sighing, he bends down to grab two orange bags of chips from the bottom shelf and then puts them into his basket, lightly shaking his head. “Yes, I heard you the first five times that you yelled at me to get the honey Dijon chips so please, shut up already and tell me what else you want.” He pauses. “Yes, I got you two bags and no, I’m not buying you any beer. How about some apple juice, though?”

Baekhyun moves towards the cooler and pulls the glass door open, reaching inside for a bottle of apple juice—but then he hesitates and stops, changing his mind at the last second and choosing instead a lychee drink and an aloe vera flavoured water. The sensation of déjà vu is strong and Baekhyun tries to literally shake it off by dusting off his clothes and ruffling his red hair, but it clings to him and refuses to let go.

“I’m also taking some cough drops for you, alright? Try not to die before I go back.” He jokingly says before hanging up and slipping his phone into the back pocket of his washed-out denim pants, heading over to the candy aisle where he spends the next couple minutes trying to decide what candy bar he feels like having tonight. Should he take cookies and cream, or the one with crushed peanuts and caramel? Oh, but the wafers covered in milk chocolate are tempting, too… ah, what should he do? “Buy two, get one free.”

Three Snickers bars are added to Baekhyun’s basket along with a pack of spearmint gum, and after one last glance at the shelves before him he decides he’s got everything he needs and therefore can move on to check-out his items. _Don’t Cry_ is playing through the speakers and Baekhyun finds himself humming and swaying along to it, even while he unloads his purchases onto the belt.

_And please remember_  
_That I never lied_  
_And please remember_  
_How I felt inside now, honey_

_You gotta make it your own way_  
_But you’ll be alright now, sugar_  
_You’ll feel better tomorrow_  
_Come the morning light now, baby_

“Oh, I love this song.” The cashier says, and his deep voice sends a chill down Baekhyun’s spine because he’s heard it before; he closes his eyes and lets himself be transported to a hill covered in green grass and flowers, where a White Knight let him borrow his lap to rest his head and sang a song to chase away his exhaustion and soothe his loneliness while waiting for the imminent End of the World to come down upon them. He remembers the Knight’s mild blue eyes and kindly smiles, too, and how heartbroken he was when they had to part ways. “And don’t you cry tonight, and don’t you cry tonight, and don’t you cry tonight. There’s a heaven above you, baby.”

Baekhyun swallows down the lump in his throat and takes a deep breath before opening his eyes, slowly trailing them over the cashier’s hands and up his torso, his breath hitching in his throat when his gaze lands on the nametag pinned to his uniform shirt.

_Chanyeol._

Everything about him, from the messy brown hair and large pointy ears to his broad shoulders and dazzling smile are the same as the Knight he met on a hill and comforted him, except his eyes in this world are brown instead of blue but they’re just as kind and soothing as Baekhyun remembers. 

“You’re real.” The redhead blurts out without thinking and then clasps a hand over his mouth when he realises what he just said, looking at the cashier with wide eyes. Rather than being confused or upset, he seems greatly amused by Baekhyun’s slip; he might be imagining it, but he looks like he wants to say something and is fighting the urge to spill it. Oh, Baekhyun is so curious. “I mean…your face looks familiar. I’m sorry if this sounds crazy, but you resemble someone I once knew.”

“There’s scientific proof that the people we see in our dreams aren’t strangers created by our brains but rather people we’ve seen at some point in our lives. All it takes is a quick glance and less than a second for their faces to etch into our memory.” The man behind him in line says as he places a can of cherry soda pop on the belt and digs out some coins to pay for it. Baekhyun peers at him over his shoulder and he can’t stop a grin from spreading across his face at the sight of the thick eyebrows framing large round eyes and red-stained lips that are smiling back at him. Seeing Kyungsoo again feels like meeting a dear friend whom he’s heard nothing of for way too long. “If you want my opinion, I think you’re perfectly sane.”

Chanyeol chortles and bags Baekhyun’s purchases, handing them over to him with a wink. “Life…what is it, but a dream?”


End file.
